Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the United States, disguised as exchange students, to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism. Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of this thoroughly indoctrinated little killer, who hates us with a passion, in this cunning double-edged satire of an American xenophobia that might, in fact, be completely justified. For Pygmy and his fellow operatives are cooking up something big, something truly awful, that will bring this big dumb country and its fat dumb inhabitants to their knees.

It’s a comedy. And a romance.

And all that I’ve read is in the broken English of the above. Somewhat puzzling bits subsequently produced from me hysterical laffin’:

For offical record, American education facility devoted humiliation and destroy all self-respect out native youth. Conspire to degrade all dignity. Calibrated tasks assigned to destroy all self-esteem.

All must sing nonsense or no allowed college, no advanced physics and training. Forced compelled to sing how yearning for location on top arched spectrum of light wavelengths created by precipitate. Exact song expressed Judy Garland, woeful martyr, slaughtered pawn of capitalist entertainment machine combined pharmaceutical complex.

….

Worst wasted time, how idiot song occupy head of operative me. Song involving how dangle in side-to-side motion from distant solar body, next convey illuminations of lunar body to domicile contained in glass vessel . . . idiot song drive all useful knowledge from head. “Junior Swing Choir” a conspiracy oppress American youths, create them future slave workforce, singing million idiot song during labor of frying meat burgers. Dunking fried potato of France deep in bin boiling fat.

The first and the last took me longer to figure out than I’m happy to admit, but once I gottem, each in turn, I cackled.

Language Log is among my favourite blogs and I thank OE for intorducing me to it. It’s often an accessible forum for issues of language and useage and grammar and hermeneutics and such. But it is as often as arcane as I imagine any theoretical physics blog to be. If I had to do it all over again, maybe I’d have called this here blog “pragmatically controlled zero anaphora.”

***

And from Language Log today, I was made to learn a new word which I doubt I’ll ever be able to put to use: divigations. Thus sayeth the OED:

The action of divagating; a wandering or straying away or about: deviation; digression.

1560Bk. Discipl. Ch. Scot. ix. (1621) 59 This skipping and divagation from place to place of Scripture. 1664H. MOREMyst. Iniq.II. I. xi. 272 That the phancy may make no divagation. 1855Ess. Intuit. Mor. 149 The illogical divagations of their adherents. 1881Sat. Rev. 1 Jan. 13 Her divagations from the proper purpose of her life will be forgotten. 1883STEVENSONSilverado Sq. ii. 78 With that vile lad to head them off on idle divagations.